Archive for January, 2010
La chica que echaba de menos el queso
Jan 29th
- ¿Qué te gusta de Valencia? -le pregunté en una de nuestras primeras clases.
- La luz, el Sol y el calor, los bares… -me contestó en un castellano recién aprendido con marcado acento neerlandés.
Un día le enseñé la expresión echar de menos, y su primera reacción fue «Echo de menos el queso de Holanda».
Otro día, querer + infinitivo; su ejemplo fue «Quiero ver el invierno con Sol».
Más tarde llegó el turno del futuro simple, y su ejemplo fue «Volveré en enero a Holanda».
Y ya le ha llegado el momento de hacer las maletas, de ir despidiéndose de todos y de mirar al futuro. Al simple y al compuesto.
Mucha suerte, Marieke. Y gracias por tu ayuda durante los últimos meses.
Pd.: La nota de tu último examen será un secreto que me quedaré yo.
J. Landa
Arctic Monkeys in Valencia – free!
Jan 25th
On 13 February the brilliant Arctic Monkeys will headline the MTV Winter concert at the City of Arts and Sciences. The rest of the lineup is yet to be announced, but the organizers are confident that it will be as successful as last year’s event when more than 38,000 people turned out to see Franz Ferdinand, Starsailor, Mando Diao, and Polock.
For more information, and to sign up to be told when the rest of the acts are announced:
Claire Hall
The return of the America’s Cup
Jan 22nd
After a lot of complicated legal wrangling in New York courts, the America’s Cup finally return to Valencia from 8 – 12 February.
While the 33rd America’s Cup won’t be as spectacular an affair as the 2007 summer edition (it will only involve a few races [3 at most] between just 2 teams – Alinghi and BMW Oracle), it’ll be nice to see the renovated port area get some more use. Now we can only hope that the weather picks up a bit.
The decision to hold this edition in Valencia came in at the last minute, which would explain why the website is still under construction with only basic information available here:
English: an easy language?
Jan 22nd
I’ve tried many times to convince non-native English speakers that English isn’t that hard a language to learn. Grammatically it’s far simpler than most other European languages including Spanish. The problem is the spelling and pronunciation. Why is “cough” pronounced “kof”? If we say “Wensday” why is it spelt “Wednesday”?
Recently I was pleased to see that the writers of no less than The Economist seem to agree with my opinion on the relative difficulty of English. Their verdict:
“English is a relatively simple language, absurdly spelled.”
The rest of the article is very interesting and worth reading if for nothing else than to discover that there really is a language called !
Read more here